Review: In Vladimir Sorokin’s ‘The Blizzard,’ a Doctor’s Long and Strange Trip

With his latest novel, “The Blizzard,” Vladimir Sorokin has written a small, strange story that has little to do with his current reputation as a Russian literary bad boy and everything to do with riffing on Russia’s fabled literary past. “The Blizzard” begins as a kind of Chekhovian tale about a doctor setting off in a snowstorm on a medical mission to a village. It soon evolves into a phantasmagorical allegory sprinkled with surrealistic scenes that recall Gogol’s “The Nose” and Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita.”

Whereas Mr. Sorokin’s novel “The Queue” (originally published in France in 1985) suggested that life is like standing in an interminable line, waiting for some unknown, perhaps unwanted item, “The Blizzard” suggests that life is like trudging through the snow — day and night, sun and storm — toward the inevitable goal post of death.

Though a handful of dream sequences in these pages showcase Mr. Sorokin’s antic and sometimes grotesque imagination, the novel as a whole is a glum, predictable and cursory affair. The doctor, a sourpuss named Platon Ilich Garin, and his nice-guy sled-mobile driver Crouper are caught in the blizzard and suffer various accidents and delays that prolong a journey that is supposed to take a mere hour and a half.

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CreditSonny Figueroa/The New York Times

Some delays are weather-related. Some are caused by the doctor’s giving into temptation — wanting to linger at a miller’s house because he is taken with the miller’s amorous wife, or wanting to linger at another rest stop and sample a new hallucinogenic drug. In fact, the doctor seems all too willing to procrastinate about getting on with his urgent mission — to deliver a precious vaccine to a village infected by a mysterious plague that is turning people into zombies.

Unlike Mr. Sorokin’s perhaps best-known book, “Day of the Oprichnik” – which imagined a futuristic Russia ruled by a latter-day czar and his sinister enforcers — “The Blizzard” does not provide a satirical look at Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia. And unlike his controversial novel “Blue Lard,” which featured a sex scene between clones of Stalin and Khrushchev and was condemned as pornographic by a pro-Putin youth group, it offers little commentary on the convulsions of Soviet history. Rather, “The Blizzard” is a dark fairy tale whose most inventive scenes remain heavily indebted to classics like Homer’s “Odyssey,” Kafka’s “The Castle” and Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels.”

Many of the more surreal incidents in “The Blizzard” concern not-terribly-amusing distortions of size and scale. Crouper’s sled-mobile is pulled by 50 miniature horses, no bigger than partridges that chirp like crickets. The miller’s wife is large and portly, but her little husband is the size of a samovar. Later on, Crouper’s sled-mobile becomes stuck in the nostril of a dead giant, who’s keeled over in the snow, and the doctor has a frightening encounter with a snowman the height of a two-story building.

In the novel’s most gripping scene, the doctor imagines he’s chained inside a large caldron of sunflower oil resting above a fire — he is going to be boiled alive, while a jeering crowd looks on. The frightened doctor begs for mercy: He recounts his life story, confesses to misdeeds, asserts that he was always a law-abiding citizen who paid his taxes on time. He sees pigeons on a nearby roof and thinks the pigeons will forgive him. When he awakens from this hallucination, it is with a renewed appreciation for life.

No doubt this episode is meant to be read as a sort of existential parable, but it never becomes more than a vividly drawn dream sequence. As for the larger novel and the doctor’s Odyssean journey through the blizzard, it devolves into a tired slog through waist-deep and seemingly endless drifts of snow.